To celebrate the start of National Novel Writing Month in less than an hour, here is the prologue to The Collapse. Wish me luck this year!

It’s hard for me to put into words what I feel from day to day as I go about my work. The chumps out there, they’ll say I always feel fantastic; that’s because I always have a smile on my face. I waltz around and cheer people up, tell them to do what they have to do so that we can all benefit from it, and they tell me how great I’m looking today. That I’m always so cheerful. That I really have brought sunshine to a desolate wasteland.

Above me is a dark, midnight sky. I don’t even know if it’s real or not, but to hell with it. It doesn’t matter if it’s real. It doesn’t matter if all the trees in this field aren’t real. Here on Cydia, nothing is real. Like my smile. What’s real is me, falling asleep underneath this sky, my body becoming wrapped in dream. I pray, speak out loud, for just a moment, that this dream will be pleasant.

She’s standing next to me, my partner in crime, my assistant, my first mate. She is everywhere with me, all the time. Part of me wishes she wasn’t there, and yet I still enjoy the company she provides. She stands just inches short of my height, and so can look me dead in the eyes and tell me when I’m wrong. She tells me that the reactor pumps aren’t functioning properly. I tell her, have maintenance look at it. I’m tired of fixing those goddamned piles of junk every week. It’s time for some new pumps.

It’s morning, or maybe it’s not. The satellite projectors that hover around Cydia are always spitting out the time of day we’d like it to be. It could be day forever, or it could be day for just a few hours. Whatever we decide that we want. That’s how long our day is. I’ve experienced a seventy-hour day before, not because I wanted it, because because the majority of Cydia decided, in some subconscious voting system, that they wanted a seventy-hour day. Out of those seventy hours, I worked sixty-eight. And she, she was by my side for sixty-two of them. And I remember all of this, even in my dream, even as she stands next to me. There is not a memory I cannot recall in an instant, of any time throughout my life.

I used to wonder what it would be like to remember my own birth. If it would be terrifying. Painful. But now I know – and so do countless other people. All of our memories, resurrected whether we wanted them or not.

“Are you worrying about them again, sir?” she says. I’m in my office now. It’s still daytime. Ten thousand feet above the ground, that used to be a frightening distance to stand. In my dream, I’m not frightened by the staggering height of the building. There are windows to protect me, and the floor seems sturdy. I’m in my best fetch, so I’m not worried about anything. Even if I fell, there would be no end for me.

My unconscious body, outside of my dream, it’s smiling. Beneath the artificial night sky, next to the artificial foliage, you can see the stupefying look on my face. You can almost read my disappointment out of that smile. Sense how fake it is. Even in my dream I’m looking to fool those around me into a false sense of security.

Back in my dream, there are files on my desk. She put them there – files about construction projects, employee layoffs that need taking care of, governmental duties. Apparently District 137’s local government suffered a coup the night before. I try to care, but District 137 has always been a shithole district. The people there, they fight over everything. Whose house is whose, what school district is the best for their children, who has the right to throw trash in what garbage can. I’m not surprised they’d overthrow their local government. It’ll happen again in a week.

Give children guns, and they’ll all be dead by day’s end. The kids we don’t like so much, we give them guns. It’s not our fault. We leave districts like 137 alone because they’re the kids with the guns – even as the reports file in, I can’t think of anything to do but to leave them as they are. Leave them to kill each other. To produce a wasteland of corpses. None of this bothers me. All of this is standard fare.

She looks at me, asks if my fetch is cramped. I tell her no, no – it’s just fine. In fact, I’m enjoying it. She nods and leaves. Before she can get out the door, I tell her, “It’s so comfortable that I wish everyone could have one of these things!”

And I put a wide smile on my face. From ear to ear, like a fucking cheshire cat.

Everyone will have these one day. I want people to have them. I enjoy my fetch. In fact, if the full extent of the experiment stopped at these artificial bodies, my smiles probably wouldn’t be as artificial as the sky. Everyone tells me how great I look because I look the same every day – my body never changes. I don’t need to eat as much. If I die, my mind is sent to a terminal and loaded into another body if I can afford one. If not, goes straight to the nearest hospital to be put in a rental. I should know. I invented the recovery system.

I sign some of the forms on the desk. A law about mining policy. A new bridge to be constructed between the east and west sides of the Tychon districts, 28 and 29, to be finished only hours after my digital signature meets the page. With my index finger, I scrawl an autograph. The page disappears. Another, and another, until all but one are gone. The last one, the final form to sign, regards an extra-planetary mission to colonize a nearby planet to gather more resources.

A suspected planet is said to harbor life, rich with water and resources. Do we send a crew? Mission will take five days to complete. Sign, then accept or deny access to shuttles.

I scrawl my autograph again, then check to accept. The page disappears, and my desk is empty. I see her walking back to the room, perhaps to check up on me, but I’m already coming back into consciousness. The world is fading back. In front of my face, I see a symbol, floating in midair; it’s a sun, a shitty little graphic to let me know that it’s daytime. A screen appears in front of my face; I’ve slept for a full hour. Eight times longer than this body requires. Looks like there are still bugs to be worked out.

Here on Cydia, there are no trees. All of the trees are fake. All of the foliage is an illusion. That last tree, the one that thought it would live forever, I’m the one who ordered it chopped down. Its roots unearthed. The tree was incinerated in a public event; some cheered, others protested. In its place, we put an artificial tree that produces pure atmosphere; we’ve since grown Cydia’s atmosphere to twice its original size. We have colonies floating where the old atmosphere used to end, such as the flourishing District 200. The Central Square building on District 200 has become a haven for researchers, traders, and adventurers. All thanks to that last tree and the countless before it.

When the last tree was destroyed, Cydia unveiled its new, global flag. We were one people at that time, and we had accomplished our greatest feat. That is what we told them. We continued on, that we were ushering in a new era of prosperity for the Cydian people, that from this point on nothing was out of reach, and everything was in our grasp. By that time, glasses were just becoming popular. Computers that went on peoples’ faces, overlaying a network of information on top of the real world. It wasn’t long before everybody had a pair. Traditional consoles were scrapped in favor of the interactive approach of the glasses.

The pages in my dream, they were not real pages. They were simply projections, overlays, illusions caused by the glasses. And when I had finished interacting with those elements, they simply faded away, delivered to their senders.

The clock in front of me grows larger. I push it out of the way and it breaks into a million pieces, each which fades away into a beautiful glimmer of glass. I force my body to move, and look up at the bright sun, then down at the green earth. A few hundred meters away begins the city of Tychon; there is a clear border between Tychon and this pasture. My office is at Tychon’s center, in the aptly named Central Square building, where I and my delegates control all that occurs and will occur in Cydia with great precision. And according to the clock, I’m late – I’ve overslept. But I’ll still walk into work with the same smile. Everyone will think that everything is okay. I haven’t overslept; I’ve simply been busy. Nobody oversleeps in Cydia, not anymore. Why would I have overslept? It is preposterous.

No, I’ve been busy preparing my next plan of action. There is a planet, a faraway world, that piqued my interest weeks ago – the planet from my dream. A five-day mission.

I take my first steps toward Tychon, its buildings towering over my puny structure. For the first time, my fetch aches. Although curious, I resolve and press on. I smile, thinking of the opportunity I will be favored with today. After all, it’s my job to waltz around and cheer people up. And after today, I’ll have brought sunshine to a desolate wasteland. And I’ll do it again tomorrow, and the next day, on and on, for eternity. Because if I don’t do it, like hell anybody else is going to.